Debian testing is the current development state of the next stable Debian distribution.

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How Debian Testing Works

Packages from Debian Unstable enter the next-stable testing distribution automatically, when a list of requirements is fulfilled:

The package has been in "unstable" at least for 2-10 days (depending on the urgency of the upload).
The package has been built for all the architectures which the present version in testing was built for.
Installing the package into testing will not make the distribution more uninstallable.
The package does not introduce new release critical bugs.

Hopefully that will clear up whether Debian Testing will be suitable for your use - it should not have any critical bugs, but is still under test, essentially.

I've been using Aptosid (formerly Sidux) for about 4 years now and never had any problems myself. I had heard that Debian Sid was unstable and for experts and sadists only. (Side note, Aptosid is only half unstable, other half are stable packages) One day I got curious and tried it on a virtual machine. Liked it so much I soon did a dual boot with it and another version of Linux and it has become my distro of choice. Don't take anyone's word for it, even mine! We all have different tastes with what we like and what we are comfortable with. Some people like stable and some would rather be on the cutting edge. If you're scared to take the plunge try Debian Testing out on a virtual machine and get a feel for it. Good luck!

Thanks for the help, I have installed Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) Stable and it has worked great I ended up installing the 3.2.0 kernel from back-ports because the iwlagn driver didn't support my wireless card but the driver in the 3.2.0 kernel does. So far it is working great and I have set it up with KDE4 along with Gnome 2.x. I am really enjoying the stability and security of Debian.

Debian is probably the distribution with the most conservative attitude of all when it comes to version acceptance. Use a "Debian Stable" if you want something which will still be running in the next ice-age. "Debian Testing" and "Debian Unstable" are by no means insecure or crash-prone, just not that rigorously tested as "Stable".

For your laptop the advatages of having newer software, which is probably farther developed by far outweighs the disadvantage of having statistically one crash more every 20 years. As long as you don't control atomic power plants or similarily sensitive things with this system you probably will come to like it. I have a "Debian Unstable" somewhere on my notebook and never had any problems with it, I mainly use Fedora Core, but that is more because of personal taste than because of any shortcoming of Debian.

Debian releases - more or less - every two years a new stable.. After another time there will be no more security upgrades, so you can't run any stable version much longer than 3 years. I wouldn't call that the next ice-age (compared to, say, Windows XP or Centos). That comes with certain advantages (one being that you don't need to upgrade packages all the time, which can be a mess if you run a lot of computers or devices). For the apps one wants newer there are debian-backports. And often it is easy enough to backport a package from testing or stable oneself. The above said: testing and unstable are both reasonably stable.

Thanks for clarifying, I find it a little confusing that unstable and testing are still fairly stable (when their labeled the way they are), I think I am going to stick with Stable as of now because I am really enjoying using Stable and am not having any problems with it. One of the things I really enjoy about using Stable (this might also be true for testing and unstable) but unlike Ubuntu (its probably because Ubuntu uses more currently packages) I don't have to install a lot of updates (sometimes I had 30-50 or even 80 packages that needed updating but now its more like 5-10).